Excel Has Equal Sign Issues?

I’d say that Excel has an issue when you’re actually trying to type an equal sign into a cell without starting a formula – in other words you need to treat the equal sign like text instead of a formula starter.

(I found that my Excel 2007 would let me create a cell with just an = with no problems but the moment I added any text after it I got the whole “#Name?” routine.)

Since I just mentioned treating it like “text” you may have already decided to just change the cell format to text.

Good idea!

And yet… that means wasted time while we move over to use the mouse and go in search of the cell formatting choices. That’s a lot of work to change the formatting of a single cell.

I have a better idea – put an apostrophe in front of it. Like this:

‘=

I hear you – you wanted an equal sign in the cell, not an apostrophe!

Don’t worry; all the apostrophe does is change the cell formatting to text without all the other hassles.

With this little trick you can use the equal sign without any extra frustration anytime you please.